Unpretentious movie reviews you can read in less than 10 minutes

Lucy is a forgettable greatest hits collection of trippy pseudoscience films that has nothing to offer except being ludicrously consistent.

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) accidentally gets caught up in a drug deal, but she soon turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human comprehension.

I overhead the ending of this movie while on commute which told me two things – it could either be so bad that its good (cult film material) or it’s a typical blockbuster (rip off of Limitless).

It’s none of the above.

Yes, the material is handled pretty well even though it becomes increasingly ridiculous. The pacing is brisk and the plot is unpredictable thanks to the script.

The movie commits to its own BS and never looks back, using a different approach to exposition. The pseudoscience isn’t exactly dumped in one conversation and explained through narration. So the movie is free to toy with the idea while making an interesting set-up.

As always, when something important needs to be said Morgan Freeman gets a paycheck gig. Scarlett Johansson is more than capable to pull off this role after her stellar performance in Under the Skin.

That being said when you look at the film closely, its as generic as the 10 percent brain myth.

guess how many % Black Widow needed to curl her hair and kick ass

It’s able to put its borrowed ideas from Space Odyssey, the Matrix, and Akira to good use but doesn’t explore its own concepts – time and cellular immortality. Instead it features ideas we’ve already been told – superhuman powers and genetic manipulation.

Lucy spends more time babbling than making good use of her godlike powers for inventive action scenes. All we get are glimpses of what she’s capable off. The rest is a generic showdown with stereotypical villains that have foreign accents.

The heroine is a one dimensional hard partying girl so there’s nothing much at stake here except for a small setback in what is surely a big “pharmaceutical” enterprise. Whatever knowledge she passed on is unclear, leading many to misinterpret the ending, which by the way featured a decade old technology (I’m hoping Lucy made a decent choice and moved to the Cloud.)

In the end, well what exactly do we have here? it’s not serviceable enough to be a blockbuster and its too shallow to be thought provoking.

Many critics praised this film because of Luc Besson’s cinematic shenanigans that turned what could have been a ridiculous formulaic female-driven action piece into something silly yet somewhat amusing. True, but you can’t also change the fact that it doesn’t have anything remarkable except for its own commitment to its bullshit science.